FBU Menu

Monday, October 6, 2008

Free Comics Monday: Crime Does Not Pay

I'm taking a break today from posting my normal faire of golden age superhero comics to give you two titles that are a little different.

The first one is Lev Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay. The only comic dedicated to the erradication of crime!

From Wikipedia...

Crime Does Not Pay is the title of an American comic book series published between 1942 and 1955 by Lev Gleason Publications. Edited and chiefly written by Charles Biro, the title launched the crime comics genre and was the first "true crime" comic book series. At the height of its popularity, Crime Does Not Pay would claim a readership of six million on its covers.

Although continuously popular in terms of sales, Crime Does Not Pay and other crime comics increasingly became the targets of concerned parents, clergy, and other groups who were disturbed by the content of the comics and saw the stories as one of the root causes of a variety of societal ills, including illiteracy and juvenile delinquency. In the wake of books such as Dr. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the investigations of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, many publishers, including Lev Gleason, censored their own comics and adopted a strict code administered by the Comics Code Authority. The sanitized Crime Does Not Pay that resulted lasted only a few issues before being canceled with issue 147 in 1955.

This next title starts with a Spirit inspired character, The Boogeyman, but from there Red Band Comics 1 is all over the place (The Sorceror, Sgt. Strong, Captain Milksop...) The end story is probably the standout - Satannas, the most evil man in the Universe!